The Leather Community Memorialized and Honored in Stone
Long before public health agencies caught up, leather communities were already organizing and saving lives — now they’ll have a permanent place in stone.
I’m incredibly excited and grateful that for my 200th post on this newsletter page I get to write about a new community project.
On Saturday, July 25, 2026, I had the honor of helping to announce a new, one-of-a-kind project to properly memorialize members of the leather community impacted by AIDS.
Whether remembering someone lost to AIDS, honoring those who lost partners or friends to the pandemic, thanking those who stepped into action when few others did, acknowledging those leather community members living with HIV, or those continuing to do the work today to prevent and treat HIV infections, this project will stand as a permanent testament to the dedication of leather community members in the face of a horrific crisis.
Read about the project below and if you’re so inclined, you can give a tax-deductible donation here.
In the National AIDS Memorial Grove, ten acres of green and quiet in the heart of Golden Gate Park, granite boulders carry names that paper cannot hold and headlines never printed. One of those stones already speaks for the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence [https://www.thesisters.org/] — the irreverent, fearless order of street nuns who turned drag into direct action and grief into ministry.
It’s time to honor another community that rallied early to fundraise and care give – the global leather community.
Thousands of people have died in San Francisco, millions in the world. The point of the National AIDS Memorial Grove is to remember them, one at a time.
– Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi
Our Vision
We are raising the funds to design, carve, and install a new memorial boulder in the National AIDS Memorial Grove — a permanent, public, granite tribute to The Leather Community.
Together with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence boulder already in place, The Leather Community boulder will continue to further honor the communities whose courage, care, and defiance carried the AIDS response forward when so much of the world looked away.
The memorial boulder will be cut from Sierra granite, the same enduring material used throughout the Grove, designed to stand for generations in a living memorial that already holds the names of tens of thousands lost to AIDS. When the Quilt is folded and the headlines have faded, these boulders still stand — in sunlight, in fog, in the quiet of any day — telling the truth about who showed up.
The Leather Community Boulder
For those who turned intimacy into survival, and survival into a movement.
Long before public health agencies found their footing, the leather community was already doing the work — helping to write and promote some of the first safer-sex guidelines, building peer-education networks bar by bar and club by club, and refusing to let fear extinguish connection.
Alongside the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and other early responders, leather communities across the country and around the world turned hard-won knowledge of risk and pleasure into life-saving practice, at a moment when that knowledge saved lives no one else was working to save.
The National AIDS Memorial first recognized the San Francisco Leather Community with its Thom Weyand Unsung Hero Award on World AIDS Day 2015, and featured this community in it inaugural Surviving Voice AIDS oral history program documentary series. This boulder reaches further: a permanent tribute to leather communities everywhere — honoring those who were lost to AIDS, and standing as well for the survivors, educators, and successors who carried that early work forward and carry it still.
They wrote the rules for staying alive while the rest of the world was still arguing about whether the epidemic was real.
Fundraising Goal
To source, inscribe, and install a memorial boulder costs $15,000, and that is our initial request of the community. We hope that leather people and allies worldwide see this memorial boulder as a way to honor every leather person they know who died of AIDS, had a partner or loved one die of AIDS, and every leather person who rose to the challenge of taking care of the sick or protecting their community.
If this initial phase of the project raises monies beyond the $15,000 goal, that money will go toward the creation of two other phases of memorial boulders we envision following the installation of the leather community boulder.
The Caregivers Boulder
For the hands that held on when almost no one else would.
Every epidemic produces a quiet army, and AIDS produced one of the largest the modern world has seen: women who buried their sons and stayed to bury their sons’ friends; family members who drove across the country to sit at bedsides; friends who became hospice nurses overnight because no one else would; doctors, nurses, social workers, and researchers who showed up to wards that ambulance drivers refused to enter.
They had no single name and wore no single uniform. History has come to call them, simply, the caregivers. This boulder honors all of them — the ones who cared through the darkest years of the crisis and did not survive it themselves, and the ones who are still answering that call today, at the bedsides of people living with HIV right now.
Caregiving was the epidemic’s second front line — fought in living rooms, hospital wards, and kitchen tables, by people the history books too often left unnamed.
The Activists Boulder
For the ones who turned grief into demand, and demand into change.
When governments stayed silent and institutions looked away, activists made silence impossible. They marched, organized, occupied federal buildings, and disrupted business as usual until research funding moved, drug approval timelines shortened, and the word AIDS was finally spoken from the (then) president’s mouth for the first time, after several years of avoidance. Their fury was strategic. Their grief was organized. Their persistence rewrote how an entire country responds to a public health emergency.
That fight didn’t end when treatments improved — it changed shape. Today’s activists are still pushing for the funding, access, and equity that prevention and treatment depend on, especially in the communities the world is most tempted to forget. This boulder honors both generations: those who fought and did not live to see the changes they won, and those who are still fighting now.
Without their voices in the streets and at the podiums, the medicine that exists today might have arrived a decade and a generation too late.
A Story Completed
Once all boulders are installed — the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence already standing, and the Leather Community, Caregivers, and Activists yet to come — it will represent a truly global constellation of communities.
Yet more visitors from San Francisco and across the world will be able to walk the Grove and find themselves, or someone they loved, named in stone: not as a footnote to the epidemic, but as one of the reasons it did not win.
Every stone we place here is a sentence in a story that refuses to end in silence.
We invite you to help us create the first of these stones for the leather community. Your gift will move the Leather Community boulder project forward.
Any donations in excess of what’s needed for the Leather Community boulder will jumpstart the fundraising for the Caregivers and Activists boulders.
By donating, you are making sure the people who saved lives and cared for others during the darkest chapter of this epidemic — along with the people still doing that work today — are remembered exactly as they deserve: permanently, publicly, and together.
If you’re so inclined to donate, you can do so here.
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